Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Back to School - School Lunch & Best Things

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

“Just one day, she wanted one of them to come home and say ‘Gee, lunch was good.’” On today’s episode, two stories about back to school: first a hilarious (and occasionally gross) account of a school lunch bag; then, in Best Things, a story from when Stephanie starts university and meets her boyfriend Tommy for the first time. And longtime Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton notices a theme that ran through so many of the Vinyl Cafe stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. I love summer, but September always feels like the real new year to me. I love the feeling of starting fresh. I'm one of those weirdos who loves change. My eldest daughter, just started kindergarten, and this year really does feel like a new chapter. Speaking of new things, we do have a few new things for you this season, and those of you who are super observant may have already noticed one of them. Any guesses? You can send us an email or find us on Facebook. While you do that, we're going to get to the first story. We have two stories about what else back to school. You can see where my mind is these days. This is the first one. This

is a story that I can really identify with. I am now packing school lunches for the very first time. And oh my God, it is so intense. It is not the kind of thing that people warn you about. Like you have a baby and they're not like brace yourself for five years from now. It's going to be really intense. I had no idea it would be like this. I mean, the moment when I unpack Eloise's lunch pack at the end of the school day and I get to see how much she's eaten, it's like some sort of bizarre Google rating system. Like she might as well just turn to me and say, two stars, mom. Crushing disappointment. Anyway, here it is.

This is Stuart McClain with School Lunch. So after supper, on the night before the first day of school, Morley sent Dave and the kids to Lawler's Drugs to buy school supplies. Morley stayed home. She had already done clothes, shoes, medical forms, the dentist, and groceries. Dave stopped at the magazines and said,

Choose what you need and I'll meet you at the cash. Sam was first back. He dumped a handful of stuff on the counter and he said, There, can I have gum too? He had chosen a pink pearl eraser, a package of five eraser tips that fit on the top of pencils, a bottle of whiteout, and a dispenser of Correcto tape. What about something to put your mistakes into, said Dave? What about a binder? What about a pen?

Pencils, said Sam, not pens. He came back a few moments later with five pencils and a red three-ring binder with Spider-Man on the front. There, he said, can I have some gum? Stephanie chose an oversized nylon binder that zipped up, a package of six pastel-colored Hillary notebooks, a giant pack of loose leaf, and a $49 fountain pen. No way, said Dave.

Put the pen back. Can I have gum, she said. The next time Stephanie floated up to the cash, she was holding five little cardboard boxes with cellophane windows. Labels, she said. She had big white labels and small white labels and labels with fancy red borders and green bordered labels and a package of little red dots.

There wasn't enough stuff in their house for all the labels she had. Please, she said, I love peeling them off the paper. I love sticking them on things. Put the red dots back, said Dave. He had to draw a line somewhere. And the fountain pen. Dave bought himself a wooden ruler with a metal ink strip for old time's sake, a small blue notebook because the pages tore out so elegantly,

and a pack of gum. On their way home, they stopped for ice cream. The world seemed perfect. The end of another summer, his children beside him with their new stuff. When they got home, Sam threw his bag on the couch. I got correcto tape, he said. You can cover anything. And an eraser, said Dave, and pencils. Morley was making coffee. Stephanie spread her new books out on the kitchen table. Should I use blue or green for history, she asked.

What about the pink one, said Morley. I always used pink for history. That's dumb, said Stephanie. Pink's for math. Morley wasn't about to argue. It was the end of a long day. She had been grocery shopping before supper. She was tired.

She had spent longer than usual in the supermarket, aimlessly gliding down the aisles, looking for things she could put in her children's lunch bags. Something new, something surprising, something they would eat. Just one day, she wanted one of them to come home and say, gee, lunch was good. You hear that just once. You hear that just once and you could die happy. Mostly what she heard was, I hate vanilla pudding.

Or don't send those yogurts with the exploding aluminum lids. exploding aluminum lids. Mostly what she got back was criticism and half-eaten lunches. What's your name? What's your name? Who? Richard. It's good to have you here, Richard. What's your name? Who? Richard.

It's good to have you here, Richard. On the afternoon, I don't know whether I'm going to be able to get through this with you, Richard. That's the problem. So anyway, she was having trouble with the lunches, if you remember. I'll just recap here. We had honeysuckle rose. And then the kids went to Lawler's Drugs to get some stuff, and Dave went with them. And then Morley went to the grocery store, and she was having a hard time getting lunch.

She wasn't the only one. On the afternoon before the first day of school, the supermarket seemed to be full of women like her, aisles of mothers trapped in the same vortex, her aisles of mothers trapped in the same vortex, defeated mothers with defeated eyes staring into the middle distance in search of school lunch. Morley felt like she'd tried everything in the store at one time or another. What kept her moving was the faint hope that there was a new idea on a shelf somewhere. She knew she was on a fool's mission. She knew even if she found something that they had never tried, she'd be crazy to buy it. Her enthusiasm for unproved items tempered by the knowledge that anything the kids turned their noses up at would be her lunch until it was finished. That's why she didn't buy in bulk anymore.

Because she had learned when it came to school lunch, her children couldn't be trusted. Last year they said they liked mango juice. So she had bought flats of mango juice from one of those discount super stores, carrying them from the car and stacking them in the basement. Enough mango juice to see them through Christmas. A pile of mango juice as high as her waist. The day she packed the first mango juice in their lunch,

they both came home and denied ever liking it. Why did you give us that stuff? Morley drank mango juice at lunch every day for two months straight. She used it to wash down the prune apple cereal bars that no one else would eat. It was either that or throw the cereal bars out, and she was damned if she was going to do that. Even Arthur, the dog, would only eat them grudgingly, leaving little mounds of wet oats around the house, which were not a pleasant thing to step in,

especially if you stepped in them unexpectedly at night, in the dark, with bare feet. This year, for the first day's lunch, Morley bought Kaiser rolls, an expensive salami, some crisp new apples and chocolate milk, and not the little ones, the big ones, full pints. Short of stuffing their lunch bags with licorice, something that she had considered doing. Two dollars worth of licorice, each, and maybe a coke or a jolt cola. Nothing else. Gee, mom, great lunch. Short of stuffing their lunch bags with candies, the Kaiser rolls and the expensive salami were the best that she could do. The kids were in bed by ten. When she went into Sam's

room to say goodnight, he was reading Mad Magazine. Be careful, he said, as she stepped over his clothes. Sam had laid everything he was going to wear on the floor, the red t-shirt tucked into the jeans, his new sneakers sticking out from the bottom of the pant legs, like he could slide into them. Morley knelt down in the darkness and pulled off a price tag that was still attached to the jeans. Stephanie had all her notebooks stacked on her desk, all neatly labeled. She'd used the labels with the red borders for her name and put a large blank white one below it to fill in the name of the subject. It's like Christmas Eve, said Morley to Dave when she came downstairs. It's like that perfect suspended moment on Christmas Eve when everyone's in bed and the presents are under the

tree and the only thing left is potential, when everything has the possibility of perfection. when everything has the possibility of perfection. Before she went to bed, Morley looked in on both her children one more time. Sam was sound asleep on his back, his hands folded behind his head, huge grin on his face. Stephanie still had her light on, reading a fashion magazine. Lights off, said Morley. And then she went back into Sam's room and stood there for a moment, looking at him, smiling in his sleep, reaching out with her

fingers and touching her son's grin. And then she went to bed. And she lay in bed, and she thought about the year ahead, and she felt pleased. First day of school was like launching a new ship. The kids had been in dry dock all summer. Tomorrow it was time to push them out to sea again. Everything was ship shape. She had done everything she was supposed to do. She began to run through the day in her mind. She got up and checked the alarm. It was set. Their clothes were ready. Their books were ready. She'd bought a box of some awful cereal for breakfast,

a cereal that would change the color of the milk they poured on it to a bright primary color, a cereal with enough sugar in it to wake them up on the first early morning of the school year. And she imagined the perfect lunch that she'd prepare, the chocolate milk, the good salami, and she'd wrap the Kaisers in saran wrap instead of wax paper so they could see what she had made them. She thought of these things and they made her smile.

And then as she lay in her bed in the darkness, Morley frowned. The lunch bags were missing. Each child had a reusable nylon lunch bag with a Velcro fastener at the top, and the lunch bags hadn't crossed her consciousness all summer. Morley frowned because she knew they weren't in the lunch bag drawer where they were supposed to be. She rolled over so she was looking towards the bedroom door, towards the stairs, and she tried to remember if maybe she'd washed the lunch bags. Maybe they were hanging in the basement. But she couldn't remember them at all, couldn't imagine where they might be.

She was sure they weren't in the basement. Because she wanted the day to be perfect, she lay in bed and in her imagination she looked through the kitchen. She did an inventory of the drawers and cupboards, but no matter where she looked, the bags were nowhere to be found. They weren't in the drawer where they belonged or the cupboard where she put things she wasn't using. She lay there for maybe 10 minutes thinking about the lunch bags before she was suddenly seized by a horrible notion. When the thought came, she sat up in bed abruptly. She knew exactly where the lunch bags were. She'd passed them a hundred times since school was out.

They were in the kids' backpacks, which were hanging downstairs by the back door where the kids had left them in June, after the last day of school, where they'd been all summer, unpacked and festering. Morley switched on the light beside her bed and got out of bed. She couldn't sleep without knowing the truth. She retrieved Stephanie's backpack first, carrying it from the hook by the back door to the kitchen table. It must have weighed 50 pounds. Crammed with every book Stephanie

had used in grade 11, how could she have forgotten about this? She pulled out the books one by one and she made a pile on the kitchen table until she got to the very bottom of the backpack. And there at the bottom of the pack was a blue nylon lunch bag with a Velcro fastener, as flat as a pancake. Morley opened it slowly and peered inside. Everything had fused together, the weight of the book squeezing the life out of the uneaten lunch. So it had hardened into a leather-like strip. Morley put the bag down and walked across the kitchen and got a pair of yellow rubber gloves from under the sink. She put them on and then she pulled at the leather thing in her daughter's lunch bag. It came out in one piece.

It didn't resemble any kind of food Morley remembered having in her kitchen. In fact, it didn't resemble food. It looked more like the pictures she had seen in National Geographic magazine of dead bog people. She put it back in the bag. Sam's lunch bag was on the top of his backpack. Morley thought she remembered packing him a pear on the last day of school and a container of yogurt, one of the ones with the exploding aluminum covers. She pulled the lunch bag out of the backpack

and opened it carefully. It was dark and damp in there. It was like a compost heap. And for a moment, she thought of reaching in, and then she thought better of it. Instead of reaching in, she closed the bag better of it. Instead of reaching in, she closed the bag and put it back where she found it, at the top of Sam's backpack, and she hung the backpack up on one of the hooks by the back door, beside Stephanie's. And she went back upstairs, and she

got into bed, but not before she had reset the alarm clock for 15 minutes earlier. So there would be time in the morning for the moment she imagined now as she lay in bed, the moment when Sam and Stephanie were eating the sugar cereal, and she said, where are your lunch bags? And she sent them to find them for themselves. It was 1.30 in the morning. They'd be up in less than six hours. As she drifted to sleep, Morley thought of a bottle of whiteout on Sam's desk, and she wondered when he would first have to use it,

and whether maybe tomorrow she should go to Lawler's Drugs and get Stephanie that fountain pen, prepared to do anything, anything to make the year ahead a perfect year for her children. Anything but cleaning out those bags. Thank you. That was the story we call School Lunch. That was recorded at the Glenn Gould Studio back in 1998. Yowzers, that was a long time ago.

The best part of that story has nothing to do with Stuart. The best part of that story is that kid, Richard, so funny. When we were out on tour with the Vinyl Cafe, we lived for moments like that, unpredictable moments. Without those little moments, a live show is really just a movie. So I love Richard and his interjections, which made that story so much better. But I also love that line at the beginning when Sam is choosing his back-to-school supplies and he chooses pencils and Correcto tape and erasers. And Dave's response is,

what about something to put your mistakes into? So great. I don't know if you heard the bonus episode in the summer where I interviewed Meg Masters, Stuart's longtime editor. But one of the things we talked about was how good Stuart was with kids. And I told Meg that the responses that Dave, the character, has to his own children are like, like I read them like they're a parenting guidebook for me. Dave is an incredible parent and that's an example of the way he would respond to his own son, which is so spot on and so funny. That story also gets at something that Stuart and I used to talk about all the time, the idea of delayed pleasure.

And not only delayed pleasure, but the idea of the moment before the moment. I've lost track of who influenced who on this one. I feel like it's something I learned from him, but it might have been the other way around. There are echoes of this idea in so many of Stuart's stories, including that one that you just heard. There's that great moment where Morley is enjoying the moment of peace before the chaos of the first day of school. Everything feeling ship-shape and ready for the next day. There's a similar moment in Dave Cook's The Turkey, the moment of perfection on Christmas Eve, Dave and Morley all cozy and tucked in bed, the moment just before the actual moment. For me anyway, that is often better than the big moment

itself. Christmas Eve is the quintessential example of that for me. I like it so much better than Christmas morning. I like the anticipation, the excitement. Sometimes Christmas morning kind of feels like a hangover. Like I've already had my effervescent moment the night before. There are so many examples of this. The moment just before your first kiss when you're wondering, is this actually going to happen? I love that moment, that fluttery feeling. That was always so much better for me than the kiss itself. And I say was because I'm happily married. And one of the downsides of being happily married is the knowledge that if all goes well, I'll never get to experience that feeling ever again, that moment before the moment, the first kiss. But I can experience it in other ways.

The moment when the lights dim in a theater just before the show begins. Perfection. Planning a vacation, dreaming about it, saving up for it, imagining what it's going to be like. So great. What else? Appetizers. I mean, come on. Like who needs the main course? They're always better. All of these things add up to the same thing. The magic moments in life are so often not the ones you expect. Often the best moments are not the big events, they're the little micro moments, the quiet little moments. And if you pay attention to that, there's a lot of joy to be uncovered, hiding under the blanket of forthcoming excitement. Stuart was so good at recognizing those moments, and his stories did so much to remind me to recognize those moments in my own life.

All right, we have to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another David Morley story. So stick around. Welcome back. Story time now. This is the story we call Best Things. turned the televisions on, had long ago fallen to sleep. It was the time of night when everything up and about was used to being up and about. A late night jogger, a cop car, a taxi cab, a garbage truck, night patrol. In front of the all-night donut store, the man who sells tomorrow's newspapers to the sleepless looked at the clock on the bank across the street and decided to pack it in. Two blocks away, Dave, sitting in his living room

with a glass of bourbon beside him and the Beatles' White Album on the turntable, raises his eyes when a car glides to a stop in front of his house. A young woman was getting out of the stopped car. Dave leaned forward when he realized the young woman was his daughter. He glanced at his wristwatch and then he watched his daughter lean back into the car and kiss his daughter. He glanced at his wristwatch, and then he watched his daughter lean back into the car and kiss the driver. It was a casual, familiar kind of kiss, a comfortable kiss. The car didn't move as she turned and walked toward the house. Dave heard her key in the latch,

saw the car's headlights blink. He hadn't been expecting his daughter home. She hadn't said that she was coming. She dropped her bag by the door, and then she jumped when Dave stirred. She hadn't expected anyone would be up. What took you so long, said Dave. I was about to give up. Stephanie laughed. Liar, she said. How are you, Daddy? She was living in residence with her best friend, Becky. They were in Mill House on an all-girls floor. Becky's decision.

The rooms were marginally bigger in Mill House, the building older and more atmospheric than any other dorm, and as Becky had said, who wants to shave beside a football player? Millhouse was more or less split in two. There were, first of all, the party girls, the girls who had been sent to the all-girls floor by their parents and their therapists, the girls who needed to be kept away from boys. These were the girls who made sure there were more boys in Mill House, the all-girls dorm, than any other dorm on campus. There were the party girls, and there were the overachievers. A group of high-strung, high-maintenance neurotics who kept the intensity of the floor festering at the level of bad therapy.

There was Lorraine. There was Lorraine, thin and pale Lorraine, who constantly worried about the food in the cafeteria. Lorraine would head off at mealtime with a sense of doom, peering woefully at the steam tables as if she might be able to spot the bacteria waving their little shrimpy tails as they lurked in the shepherd's pie. There was Marissa, who was paranoid about her stuff and called a floor meeting because, she explained tearfully, someone had used some of her shampoo. Which of course ensured that everyone began using Marissa's shampoo. Before long, the girls at Millhouse weren't only using Marissa's shampoo, they were deviously, day by day, refilling her bottle with other brands. There was Sandy, an only child who became flustered by the unrestrained exchange of clothes going on all around her. Sandy, who couldn't abide the idea of trading clothes, took disinfectant to the laundromat and ran the washing machine through a complete cycle before adding her stuff.

the washing machine through a complete cycle before adding her stuff. Sandy, who carried a tube of antibacterial hand gel in her purse and a spray for toilet seats. Sandy, who ironed her bras. Jane Turnbull, a strapping blonde who played on the women's lacrosse team, belonged to the other group. Jane was a party girl. Jane had the room next to Stephanie and Becky's. It was the beginning of October when Jane started talking about Montreal. She knew about a sorority at McGill where you could stay cheap, and all she needed was someone to go with her. She kept telling everyone about the bistros and the dance clubs, the old port and the old town, but it wasn't the food or the wine or the architecture that was the force driving Jane. Jane wanted to go to Montreal for the culture.

Jane wanted to French kiss someone who could speak French. Actually, she said one night when a group of them were sitting in the fifth floor lounge, she shouldn't speak a word of English. I want unilingualism. It was Lorraine who looked up from her book blankly and said, Jane found a couple of guys from the men's lacrosse team to drive her to Montreal. They left on a Friday after lunch, Jane sitting in the front making cute with the lacrosse guys, a French-English dictionary in her lap, leaning out the window like Britney Spears, high-fiving Becky in front of Kerr Hall. Auf Wiedersehen, she called as the car turned off campus. She meant au revoir, right?

Said Becky to whoever she was walking with. Jane's boyfriend showed up at Mill House about three hours later. No one knew it was Jane's boyfriend, of course. No one, in fact, had ever heard Jane had a boyfriend. He was just this guy standing in front of Mill House looking lost and confused, which in itself wasn't unusual. There were often boys standing in front of Mill House looking lost and confused. The difference between this guy and the other dazed-looking guys who stood in front of Milhouse was that this guy was standing in the rain.

His name was Tommy Nolan, an English major from the University of Toronto. Tommy was wearing a t-shirt with a big picture of April O'Neill on the front, the TV news reporter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was also wearing a pair of blue corduroy pants a size too large for him and a pair of bowling shoes with the number 7 on the heel. He said he and Jane had been going out for three years, ever since grade 10. He had a picture in his wallet and a letter. I got it yesterday, he said. The letter was less than a page.

Maybe now that we're at different schools, maybe we should see other people. I don't know. What do you think? Tommy knew what he thought. He didn't want to see other people. And that's why he was there, standing in the rain. He was there to tell Jane that he thought this was a bad idea. Except he was telling it to Stephanie instead of Jane because Jane was long gone, and it was Stephanie who had stopped and said, are you looking for someone? It was Stephanie who had stopped and said, can I help you? So Tommy told her all about Jane, and Stephanie said, well, Jane isn't here. Jane went to Montreal.

She didn't say Jane was in a car with two guys from the lacrosse team. She didn't say, you've just been dumped by a girl who's gone to Montreal to get French kissed. Tommy said, when's she coming back? Stephanie knew she should say never. Jane's never coming back. Instead, she said, I don't know. I got a ride here from a guy who isn't leaving until Sunday, said Tommy vaguely. And that's when Becky came along. That's when Stephanie said, Becky, this is Tommy Nolan. And then with exaggerated clarity added, you know, Jane's boyfriend from Toronto. And Becky, who didn't get it, Becky, who had no idea what was going on, said, Jane doesn't have a boyfriend in Toronto. In her eagerness to clear things up, Stephanie blurted out the truth.

Things are not as bad as you think, she said to Tommy. They're worse, or words to that effect. And before long, Tommy Nolan was no longer standing in the rain in front of Mill House looking lost and confused. He was standing there looking lost, confused, and devastated. I don't even have my wallet, said Tommy. Tommy's wallet was in his suitcase. I left the suitcase in the trunk of the car, he said, and the car wasn't coming back for him until Sunday at noon, and it was still raining. Tommy ran his hands through his hair and started to shake his head and said, this reminds me of my worst field trip ever. I was in grade two, he said. And it was just like this out. One of those gloomy days with the clouds clinging to the ground, and we went to a sheep farm. I was wearing my big bird

raincoat. And I got separated from the class and ended up surrounded by sheep. I couldn't see anyone, and they always told you if you got lost, you were supposed to sit down and stay where you were. So I sat down in the middle of the sheep, and because it was raining, the sheep weren't moving, and they didn't find me for two hours. didn't find me for two hours. Stephanie said, that's awful. And Tommy nodded. Have you any idea, he said, what wet sheep smell like? And then he looked at Stephanie and he said, do you have any bad field trip memories? And before she knew it, she was telling him about the planetarium. Tommy said, oh, a lot of people have bad memories about the planetarium. Tommy said, oh, a lot of people have bad memories about the planetarium. And that was when Stephanie decided to give him sanctuary.

He could sleep in Jane's bed until Sunday morning. Jane's roommate, Sandy of the Iron Bra, could move into Stephanie's room for two nights. That would be great, he said. Thanks. At supper, she told the lady in the cafeteria that her roommate was sick in bed, and the lady gave her a tray of food to take back to the dorm, shepherd's pie. Tommy tucked into it with gusto. I love this stuff, he said. Stephanie had never seen anyone so happy with a school meal. I worked in the kitchen at U of T. He said, you know how they make this stuff? He was waving at his plate with his fork. They pump

the meat into the kitchen right out of a truck through a pipe. It's like furnace oil. Actually, he said, grinning for the first time since he arrived, it's not technically meat, it's ground meat product. You gotta love modern science. Unfortunately, Lorraine had just wandered by. The potato, said Tommy, licking his lips, comes in preformed sheets. This was worse than anything Lorraine had ever imagined. Stephanie had to spend an hour talking Lorraine down. That night she had to sleep on the floor of her own room.

This was your idea, said Sandy, who had settled into Stephanie's bed. I'm not sleeping on the floor. Sandy, it turns out, talks in her sleep. Not polite murmurs, but loud, outbursts like she's making public service announcements. And each announcement is prefaced by a percussive snort. She's sleeping quietly and then she blows like a whale coming up for air. Stephanie would be asleep or worse, floating in that confusing place that precedes sleep, and Sandy would detonate and then sit up abruptly and bellow, always loud and usually aggressively.

It's too late for that now, she barked at midnight. I'm not going to allow it. Each announcement left Stephanie lying on the floor with her heart pounding. Each eruption took her a little further away from sleep. She finally fell into a half-sleep at 4.30, rueing the impulse that had made her stop and talk to Jane's boyfriend, Jane's ex-boyfriend. She woke at 8 to yelling and slamming doors. Sandy had gotten up and gone next door and discovered Tommy had slept in her bed instead of Jane's. He'd also worn her robe to

the bathroom. Marissa of the stolen shampoo had walked bleary-eyed and half-asleep into the bathroom to confront Tommy Nolan, nude, holding her bottle of shampoo in one hand and her pink lady Bic razor in the other. It took Stephanie half an hour to convince Marissa not to wake up the dawn and another half hour to calm Sandy down. She said, it's only for one more night, she said. We'll disinfect the sheets. Besides, she said, he doesn't have anywhere else to go. We can't turn him out onto the street. She was beginning to wonder why not. Stephanie had a paper to write. She hadn't even finished

the reading, and now she was spending more time conducting therapy than doing the work she needed to do. On the way to the library, she stopped at the hub for a coffee. Tommy Nolan was sitting in the corner writing something in a black hard-covered notebook. He had a glass of water in front of him. He smiled when he saw her, and he motioned toward the empty chair across from him. She sat down to be polite. You look tired, he said. Stephanie shrugged and looked at his notebook. Oh, he said lists. Stephanie didn't say anything. Tommy said, all-time favorite UFO movies, all-time favorite songs sung by movie stars. Stephanie nodded. Tommy said,

I was just adding to my list of toys that disturbed me when I was a kid. just adding to my list of toys that disturbed me when I was a kid. He's just had his heart broken, thought Stephanie. Be patient. Try to look sympathetic. I'd forgotten about mouse traps, said Tommy. You could spend an entire afternoon setting that trap up and then just before you started playing, somebody would knock something or a gear would stick. I don't think it ever worked for me. What a stupid game. And then he sighed and said, I guess I'm feeling stupid. Stephanie said, what else is on your list? Tommy said, we had a little dog where you flipped a switch and it would walk around in a circle and bark and then do a somersault. It drove me nuts. And my brother had a teddy bear that talked. It was supposed to be cute, but it had these eyes and it sounded like Satan. I hated it.

And the spirograph, he added, the spirograph was torture. We had the spirograph, said Stephanie, and the Easy Bake Oven, which worked once or twice and then it never worked again. But we used to make the dough and eat it raw. And then she said, can I get you a coffee? And when she came back to the table, she said, what about Speak and Spell? Is Speak and Spell on your list? It was pretty critical, said Tommy. Critical, said Stephanie. It was always so pleased with itself whenever it won. Sometimes I can still hear that voice in my head. Wrong, you're wrong. Try again. Stephanie took Tommy with her to a party that night. It was a disaster. Stephanie took Tommy with her to a party that night.

It was a disaster. She spent the whole night alone. Someone told the boy that she had her eyes on, that she had brought the guy in the April O'Neil T-shirt, and he stayed away from her all night. Tommy had a wonderful time. Tommy danced with everyone. Tommy seemed to be getting over Jane. And then when Stephanie finally decided that she had had enough,

Tommy appeared at her side. I should go too, he said. Great, thought Stephanie, so everyone thinks I'm leaving with him too. Halfway back to Millhouse, he suddenly said, Have you ever had a crush on a cartoon character? What do you mean, she asked. But she knew exactly what he meant, and she could feel her heart beating faster. When I was really young, he said, I had a crush on Babs from Tiny Toons.

Later, I crushed on Gadget from Chippendale Rescue Rangers. And then he said, pointing to his chest, there's April O'Neil from the Turtles., and lately I've been sort of wondering about the Baroness from G.I. Joe. What do you think she'd look like in leather? Stephanie had stopped moving. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. She thought she was the only one. All these years, she just assumed that she was messed up. I like Eric from The Little Mermaid, she said slowly, watching him carefully. Not sure that he wasn't making fun of her, but he didn't look like he was making fun of her. He was nodding. So she kept going. I had a minor crush on Robin Hood from the Disney show, she said. And Peter Pan, of course. Of course, she thought to herself.

Of course? What did she mean, of course? Like this was normal? Like everyone had a crush on Peter Pan? And sometimes, she said, throwing caution to the wind, sometimes, if I'm in the right sort of mood, Bart Simpson can seem sort of cute. I'm in the right sort of mood, Bart Simpson can seem sort of cute. And you know what Tommy Nolan said? He didn't say, are you nuts, like she expected him to. He said, who else? She laughed out loud before she answered.

And she looked at him carefully, her eyes widening, seeing him maybe for the first time, seeing not the soaked boy who had stood dejectedly outside Mill House the night before, but someone entirely different, someone who made her feel completely normal, absolutely herself. She said, I've always thought Commander Cobra was kind of cute. And Tommy said, well, that's because he always had the best lines in the show. On Sunday, she got up early and went to the library to work on her paper. But it was hard to concentrate on the Hemingway because she kept wondering what Tommy was doing. What he was doing was sitting on the far side of the library writing in his notebook.

He wasn't working on his list anymore. He was writing a poem, a poem for Stephanie. I am writing this, he wrote, on Sunday morning. I'm sitting at a desk in the library with a newspaper open in front of me and the peace that comes to those with time on their hands. Behind me there's a large window bathed in the warmth of this October sun. And across the room I can see you working on your paper about Ernest Hemingway. My horoscope says that the moon is in Saturn, a time for change. But as I sit here and watch you work, I wonder what Saturn could have to do with anything, when no one even knows whether the rings are shattered moons or snowballs,

or why it confused Galileo so when it filled his cardboard and leather telescope, all hazy and yellow. But most importantly, I'm wondering how you do that thing with your nose, the way it crinkles like that every time you stop to think, and why it makes me feel like this. He liked his poem. He read it over several times before he put his book back in his pocket, stood up and left the library. But it was some weeks before he had the courage to send it to Stephanie.

Tommy came back the next weekend. but it was some weeks before he had the courage to send it to Stephanie. Tommy came back the next weekend. He got a ride down on Saturday morning and went right back that night. They went for a long walk along the river and out for pizza. He was wearing his Bart Simpson t-shirt. He kissed her when he left. It was Tommy in the car with Stephanie last Thursday night. It's been almost a year now, and they're still together.

He picks her up at the station whenever she comes home. They spend weekends together whenever they can. Morley sometimes worries that it's hard on Stephanie to be dividing her time between two places. Dave worries that his daughter may not be getting everything she can out of campus life. But Morley and Dave both remember the beginnings of their own romance, when Dave was still on the road and seemed so far away. The letters, the late-night phone calls, and that deep, sure knowledge that the best things in life,

the great, wonderful things, always take time and never come without effort and patience. Thank you very much. That was the story we call Best Things. I just love that poem that Tommy writes for Stephanie. Tommy was created way before I started working on the show, but he reminds me so much of my very first boyfriend, Brent. Brent, like Tommy was or is, I haven't talked to him for a long time, but certainly when I knew him, he was a lovely guy. He didn't write me poems, but he did draw me these beautiful comic books where we were the characters in them. And he made me these mixtapes. He loved music, the same as I did. And I would spend hours listening to the lyrics, trying to tease out what he was trying to tell me. There was always a message to these mixtapes, and I loved uncovering it. So it makes me happy to think of Stephanie falling

in love with someone like that, someone quirky and smart and full of love and not afraid to show it. We have to take a short break right now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with a sneak peek from next week's episode. It's one of my all-time favorite scenes in any story ever. So stick around. You should hear it. That's it for today. We'll be back here next week with two more Dave and Morley stories, including this one. My name's Nick, said the kid. The kid looked terrified. He was squirming up and down against the counter like an elephant scratching on a tree.

He was trying to shift everything back into place. Dave couldn't help himself. He liked the kid. He decided to give him one last chance. Dave said, do you like Dylan, Nick? The kid nodded. He had no idea what was going on, but he knew it was bad. Dave smiled. Dave said, what about Duran Duran? Dave was playing what if again. The kid said, Duran Duran, I hate Duran Duran. Dave said, good answer. And then without thinking about what he was doing on an impulse he never understood but grew to be proud of because, well, because it worked out so well, Dave offered the kid a job.

A job, said the kid. The kid's head was spinning. Yeah, said Dave, I need some help after school. You look like an honest guy. Things were definitely not going the way the kid had expected them to go. The kid said, working? Like what? Helping out, said Dave. Stocking, cleaning, looking out for shoplifters, that kind of thing. The kid swallowed. Kid said, I don't think so. Dave said, good, without missing a beat. Why don't you start tomorrow? Minimum wage, except for tomorrow, of course.

You've already been paid for your first four hours. Dave clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a last friendly shake. The album the kid had pressed against his body fell to the ground. Dave pretended not to see it. See you tomorrow, he said, and he turned and walked back to the cache. The kid picked up the record and put it back in the crate where he got it. On the way past the counter, he stopped and said, I'm still Dave. See you tomorrow. I just love that scene. I mean, how did Stuart come up with that? So surprising and so Dave to take something negative and just

make something out of it to tease out the silver lining. You can hear the whole story next week on the podcast and find out how it works out for them. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Our recording engineer is one of my dear friends, Greg Duclute. Theme music is by Danny Michelle. The show is produced by Louiseise curtis and me jess milton let's meet again next week until then so long for now